THE

LIBERTARIAN

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Nervous Republicans

Of late, things have been interesting over at
LewRockwell.com, a
paleo-conservative and, until recently, libertarian organ. Rockwell
reported that "Third parties are dead". He didn't support this bold
assertion but he's sure it's true and he's terrible unhappy about it.
Then he put up an article lambasting Libertarian Party members as
"Useful idiots" and the Libertarian Party as a slightly more
dangerous version of a "Dungeons and Dragons club meeting in the
basement of the student union."

The author ridicules the Libertarian Party as irrelevant. He then
accuses it of stealing the Senate from the Republicans and making
Gore's challenge in Florida feasible. He was apparently having such
an intense hissy fit that he didn't notice his self-contradiction.

I expect that we'll see a number of similar articles during the next
few years. The arguments of the Nervous Republican can be summarized
as follows 1) The Republican candidate is entitled to the libertarian
vote, even when the Republican candidate is a socialist.

The Republican Party is so focused on frittering away freedom in the
vain hope of getting votes from socialists or approval from the mass
media that they can't understand it when, as a direct consequence,
they lose the votes of people who care about liberty.

2) Sure, we're evil, but the Democrats are more evil. If you care
about liberty, you have nowhere else to go. We own you so we don't
have to live up to the promises we make.

That may work for a while, but people know it's wrong to support evil
and tire of being betrayed.

3) Our candidates may say that they want more socialism but they
don't really mean it. They're just lying to win votes.

People tire of being lied to. Most people have learned that when a
Republican candidate says he wants to enact another socialist program
or place more limits on constitutionally protected liberties, he
means it.

That's it. That's all they have to offer. That's why they're nervous.
Nearly every Republican I describe the Libertarian Party to ends up
voting for our candidates. We have something to offer. The
Republicans have power but nothing else.

The Republicans center their campaigns on prolonging and extending
immoral and destructive socialist programs their betters fought
against. They vote for "reasonable gun control" which results in
increased crime, and the deaths of innocent people, while
simultaneously asserting that they understand and uphold the
Constitution. They vote for utterly unconstitutional, un-American,
and anti-liberty laws which penalize people for crimes which harm
nobody else. They apologize to the media for what little faith they
have in liberty.

The Republicans are nervous. They're nervous because they used to
have something to offer and they're afraid that they're about to lose
it. They used to be able to offer the promise of liberty.

They kept making the promise throughout the Reagan-Bush era of
increased government spending and multiplying gun control laws—
"But we wanted to cut spending. We just didn't have the support of
the Democrat Congress". This argument is, perhaps, plausible.

They kept making the promise throughout the Clinton era, in which a
Republican Congress whined "We wanted to abolish all those
bureaucracies we promised to but Clinton wouldn't let us so we
increased their budgets instead." This argument strains their
credibility to the breaking point.

They held the tenuous position that a Republican President and
Democrat Congress results in increased government power, a Democrat
President and a Republican Congress results in increased government
power, but that, if the Republicans controlled the Congress and
Presidency, then—then we would see the Federal government slashed
to those powers explicitely delegated in the Constitution—then the
Republicans would finally get government out of our lives.

What if they fail? What excuse have they left to offer—that they
need control of Congress, the Presidency, and the media in order to
push government back? If government continues to grow, no credible
excuses remain.

The Republicans must be terrified. They have what they wished for.
The House is theirs. The Senate, with the Vice President's
tie-breaking vote, is theirs. The Presidency is theirs. If they do
not live up to the promise of liberty, their long-suffering
supporters will see the Republican party for what it has become and
be left with no alternative but to find a party that truly cares
about liberty—one that will bind the government down with the
chains of the Constitution.

The Republicans are nervous. They have good reason to be nervous, for
the Libertarian Party lives and there is only one way to kill it:
enact its platform.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you,
then you win.—Gandhi